Cricket Song
by J. Swift
Sunlight falling
through golden leaves,
soft kisses of warmth and
the curve of her child’s cheek
snuggled against her own.
“Sun? What do you think?”
Sun pushes the memory away and snaps back to her office where she sits with a colleague, Rami Singh. They’re going over blueprints; the holo specs for the new desalination plant hover between them. She focuses on Rami’s face. Impatience pulls at his mouth, but there’s a hint of real concern in his eyes. He’s been waiting for her to answer for some time. Her pulse speeds up.
“I don’t want to submit to the board until we know the TDS,” she says as if nothing just happened.
Rami frowns. “The test results came through an hour ago. Didn’t you see them? Under 400 milligrams per liter, and we managed to up the manganese to point zero two.”
Sun smiles, joy sweeping through her. They’d done it. The new plant would work just as they’d promised, purifying salt water from the Pacific and turning it into optimal drinking water at a third of the cost of other facilities. Fifteen million people struggling to survive in the arid American southwest would soon have access to more freshwater than they’d seen in decades. “Call Sweet Water and set up a meeting then,” she says. “Any time next week is fine with me.”
“I’ll have Dar and Chan work on a presentation. We’ll model some best-case scenarios, maybe go out to 2160. Dar has—”
Sunlight falling
through golden leaves,
soft kisses of warmth
As quickly as the memory comes, it blinks out.
Rami’s voice: “—but even if they don’t agree, I still think that’s the best option.”
Sun nods, going along with the moment. Rami knows what he’s doing; he’ll take care of things. “That sounds great,” she says. “Just keep me in the loop.”
For the next few hours she immerses herself in the technical details of the latest iteration of cold fusion water pumps: gigs of data on electrolytic conditioning and nickel cathodes. She only slips into that moment of sunlight and love, seventy years gone, once more before the day is done. It’s not as if she’s compromised. It’s not as if that first, sacred memory that came to her like a poem after her brain implant—the memory that gave her her new name, Sunlight Falling—it’s not as if that memory has become a cancer.
On the way home, Sun stops at her child’s apartment. Mic is on their own at the moment, having dissolved their marriage by mutual consent with their former spouses. Tonight they’re home, making dinner the old fashioned way, one ingredient at a time. The window is open to the chirp of crickets carried on the evening breeze. Sun sits at the prep station watching Mic chop carrots, tomatoes, onion, celery; so many fresh vegetables naked on the cutting board reminds her of the long ago days when she used to cook for the two of them.
“It’s going to be a soup,” Mic says. “I’ve got the lentils simmering.”
“What about garlic?”
“In the pot with the lentils.”
“Tarragon? Mint? Saffron?”
Mic nods. “All there, Mom. And some parsley for garnish just like you taught me.”
“I seem to remember you always leave the parsley out.”
“That was the old me. The new me values tradition.” Mic flashes a smile, scratches their right cheek and leaves behind a bit of celery leaf. It sits high on their cheekbone, bright yellow-green against the deep brown of their skin. A chubby curl of black hair falls into their eyes as they bend forward to whack the rest of the celery tops off the stalks. They’re wearing a sleeveless shirt, and their arms are hard with muscle.
Mic enjoys working out, even though biotransplants and telomere regeneration are more than enough to keep them vigorous. Sun would rather spend her days sprawled in her office chair, dreaming up new ways to extract fresh water—from oceans, peatlands, Martian permafrost: the greater the challenge, the better. Just another way the two of them diverge, but when Sun first laid eyes on Mic, she’d imagined only similarities.
“When you were born—” Sun says.
Mic looks up at her, knife poised in the air.
“When you were born I thought, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done.’”
“And then I spit up all over you, and you realized you’d indentured yourself to a monster.”
“Maybe, but I thought, it’s the cutest damn monster I’ve ever seen—and it’s mine.” She picks up a circle of onion and admires its translucence. “But I was wrong,” she says to the onion. “You don’t belong to me. The only thing that’s mine are my memories of you.”
Mic puts down the knife. “OK, what’s going on? You haven’t been this touchy feely since . . . I don’t know. Maybe not since my wedding, and that was thirty-two years ago.”
Sun drops the onion and closes her eyes and shares her memory aloud:
Your suit was blue as a clear summer sky.
Your spouses’ were pale as sea foam.
The hall smelled of lilacs
and new mown grass
and every good thing.
I had never seen you so happy.
When the bells rang out, I cried,
But you stood wrapped in love
and never noticed.
She opens her eyes again to see Mic blinking fiercely. “That was a low blow,” they say.
“It’s a true memory.”
“I know it is, but sometimes, Mom, that chip of yours keeps things too sharp. Maybe some things need to fade. Like those old pictures they used to have where the images got lighter and lighter as time went on.”
They’ve had this argument before: Mic swearing they will never get a brain implant because life is meant to crescendo and then gently fade away, Sun listening patiently, confident that when Mic is old enough they’ll capitulate to reality. Science has extended the human lifespan far beyond the species norm, and the brain, too, needs a boost. If she didn’t have that tiny piece of technology in her brain, she might have already lost the details of Mic’s wedding: she might find it harder and harder to recall the design specs for her desalination plants; she might no longer be the person she is.
“Memories fade because human lifespans have doubled,” Sun says. “Our brains don’t have the capacity to process that many memories. That doesn’t mean the memories are gone; it just means you can’t access them anymore. And the new ones you need to make don’t have anywhere to go. You get beyond seventy, and things start to short out.”
“That’s what you always say,” Mic counters. “I’m seventy-three, and things are still going strong.”
“You don’t remember your wedding the way I do.”
Mic gives her a solemn look. “My memories may not be as poetic, but they’re easier to take, and I like them that way.”
Sun realizes it’s time to retreat. She examines the vegetables still waiting to be chopped and points at the green bell pepper. “Only put in half of that. A little goes a long way.”
“I like green pepper,” Mic says stubbornly.
And then Sun gets a tap on her com link from Rami marked urgent. “Sorry,” she says to Mic as she accepts.
“We’ve got a problem,” Rami says in her ear. “Sweet Water is backing out.”
“What?” Sun exclaims out loud. Mic looks at her sharply, and she grimaces at them and switches to subvocalizing. “They can’t just pull out now.” For a decade, Sweet Water has partnered with her in the construction of desalination plants from Egypt to Mexico.
“They say the potential profit isn’t high enough.” Something unspoken lurks in Rami’s voice.
“You don’t believe that, do you? The profit margin is higher than the plant in Baja.”
“I think they’re worried.”
“About what?”
“Look, maybe we can talk about this in the office tomorrow.”
“What aren’t you telling me, Rami? What are they worried about?”
Rami hesitates. “They’re worried . . . they’re worried about you.”
“Me?” A chill comes over her. Why would Sweet Water lose confidence in her? She’d done stellar work with them, important work, for years.
“You’re the heart and soul of this company, and you haven’t been yourself, Sun. You lose track of things. You zone out when people are talking to you. You transposed the results on the last load test. Tell me I’m wrong.”
She takes a deep breath. Another. A monster has her by the throat. “I’m not—”
Sunlight falling
through golden leaves
No, not now! She pushes the memory away, but it’s like denying her own soul.
soft kisses of warmth and
the curve of her child’s cheek
“I’m not—” She tries to get up from her chair. “I can’t—”
the curve of her child’s cheek
snuggled against her own
“Stop!” She’s shouting. Why is she shouting? She was on a com call with Rami . . .
She remembers
Sunlight
She remembers
golden leaves
She remembers
the curve of her child’s cheek
snuggled against her own
“Mom, it’s OK. I’ve got you.”
She’s on the floor with Mic’s arms around her, her face pressed tight against their chest.
“The ambulance is coming,” Mic says, and Sun hangs on to them as if she will never let go.
The clinic is bright and cheerful. The walls of Sun’s room are inlaid with colorful mosaics of bird species brought back from extinction. She recognizes painted buntings, redwing blackbirds, and the flashy black-white-and-yellow of a male bobolink, a bird she had loved in her childhood more than a century ago. She hasn’t thought of bobolinks in years, but once upon a time, the liquid song of the males in spring could make her world dance. Their song is a pale memory now, lacking poetry.
Her head hurts. She puts her hand to her right temple and discovers a bandage. She’s injured, but when? How?
A woman enters her room, pulls up a chair by her bedside and sits. The woman is tall, angular, her features too sharp to be pretty. Sun knows the woman is one of her oldest friends, but there’s no specific memory attached to that information. It’s as if a database of facts lives in her head, devoid of emotion.
The woman takes her hand and squeezes it. “Hi. Do you know me?”
“Roses in Winter.”
“And do you know your name?”
“Sunlight Falling.” Her name should come with a memory. Sun tries to bring one up, but there’s nothing.
“That’s good, Sun,” Winter says. “Do you know where you are?”
Sun’s palms start sweating. Something’s wrong here. “It’s the neurological clinic where you work. Why am I here?”
“You were brought in yesterday. You have a glitch in your implant—a recursive memory infraction.”
And Sun remembers collapsing on the floor in Mic’s kitchen, Mic holding her in their arms as if they were the parent and she a little child, but she can’t remember what triggered the collapse.
“Your implant is a first-generation,” Winter says. “I thought mine was old, but yours is an antique.” She smiles and her features are unexpectedly transformed into something almost angelic. Sun clutches Winter’s hand tighter.
“The glitch isn’t unexpected,” Winter continues. “Your implant was never designed to last your whole life. They must have told you that when you got it.”
Sun releases Winter’s hand and touches the bandage on her temple instead. “You went in and fixed it.” That would explain the dullness clouding her mind, the lack of emotion leaching the color from her memories. Her synapses have to rebuild their connection to the implant.
“I can’t fix it, Sun. I’ve walled off the corrupted section to stop the memory from cycling. That’s why your thoughts are so hazy. Many of your memories are inaccessible, and the others are reduced in detail.”
She digests this information. “What happens now?”
“You need to make a decision. Your implant will continue to degrade. I’d like your permission to go in and remove it and replace it with the latest model. The new one will provide you with memory capacity for the rest of your life.”
The sweaty, edgy feeling subsides. Sun laughs. “That’s an easy decision. Go ahead.”
Winter holds up her hand. “There’s risk. There always is with brain operations, but for this, it’s tricky. You won’t lose overall cognitive ability. Your verbal, mathematical and analytical skills will remain, and you should retain your task-oriented memories. That means you’ll still be able to design all the desalination plants you want.”
“But . . . ?”
“But you’ll lose the event-specific memories I’ve walled off. That could be anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of your total memories, spanning your entire lifetime up to this point.”
Dismay seizes her heart in an iron fist. “Fifty percent?”
“That’s a worse-case scenario, but it is possible.”
She imagines losing half her lifetime. The moments, good and bad, that molded her into the person she is. Who is she without those memories? “My name,” she says. “Sunlight Falling. It comes from the most beautiful memory of my life, my first memory after the implant. But I can’t remember it, Winter.”
Winter nods, a frightening compassion in her eyes. “Your anchor memory is the glitch. I’m sorry, Sun, but there’s no way to save it.”
“I see,” Sun says, but she doesn’t. Sunlight Falling. Sunlight falling where? What part of herself is tied up in that memory?
Winter lays a reassuring hand on Sun’s shoulder. “When we implant your updated memo-prosthesis, we’ll lead you through the process to establish a new anchor memory. You can take a new name, then, if you want.”
Sun nods, not trusting herself to speak.
Mic sits in the same chair Winter occupied earlier, but they don’t hold Sun’s hand or pat her on the shoulder. That’s not the sort of relationship the two of them have. It never has been, as far as Sun can remember.
“Why are we having this conversation?” Mic says for the second time that afternoon. “You’ve got at least sixty more years, Mom. I know you: you don’t want to retire. You always say your work matters more than anything. People are counting on you, and Rami can’t run the company alone. You have to have the procedure.”
“It’s not about the work.” Sun hates the plaintive sound of her own voice.
Mic gazes at her, waiting.
“I might lose half my memories.”
“You can always make new ones.”
She turns away, plucks at her sheets like a fidgety child, then makes herself stop. “Did I tell you about my namesake memory? Did I describe it?”
Mic shakes their head. “You said it was personal.”
“I don’t want to lose it.”
Mic gives her a long look. “If you can’t remember it, then you won’t know what you’ve lost. How important can it be compared to the rest of your life?”
She can’t answer that. How can she explain this loss at her core?
Mic unexpectedly leans over to give an embrace made clumsy by Sun’s half-reclining position. “Last night when you collapsed was bad,” they say in her ear. “I don’t want you to have to go through something like that again.” They leave unspoken the rest of the thought: they don’t want to go through that again, either.
They pull back and gaze down at her. Sun tries to hold their stare and can’t. Something inside her capitulates: she’ll have the procedure. It’s the logical thing to do; the future has to be lived. Whatever she must give up, it will hurt far less than seeing that look in her child’s eyes.
Cricket song
and cool breeze,
a symphony of colors
lie across the cutting board,
and in her child’s eyes, a smile.
“Stay with the memory,” a voice says.
She does. She breathes it in as she becomes fully aware. She’s lying on her left side, warm and deeply relaxed, while figures in white scrubs and face masks bustle about, powering down screens or whisking away sleek bits of technology.
“Can you tell me your name?” the voice asks.
And her name emerges like a butterfly from the chrysalis of memory. She opens her mouth and speaks it aloud.